Fox Open Sports Platform 0.3 Development Update

I recently said on the OOTP forums that the FOSP was on indefinite hold and I had no plans to revisit in the immediate future. Then a few people on the forums asked about the Storylines and Playoffs mods and I realized these were actually 98.5% done, they just needed to be tested once more, bundled and released.

Consider the hold temporarily lifted.

The 0.3 version of the FOSP will be coming out in October 2013. Kind of fitting as that’s the month in 2011 that I came forward with the idea for it in the first place. Two years later, we’re on the third release.

Why release now after one and half years since 0.2?

Because people are asking for it, pretty much.

Beyond that, I worked for about a year after 0.2 on the Open Sports Toolkit (OST), an open source sports statistics abstraction library. It was a grueling process but in January on this year I broke through some difficult technical hurdles and finally got my stats list demo working. During the launch of OOTP 14, I began integrating the OST into the larger set of modules and ironed out a lot of bugs. So it’s pretty much done, I just never actually put out an official release.

Although I’m not sure it’s 100% ready for prime time, the release is stable enough to be used on sites hoping to enhance their StatsLab or OOTPOU experiences with some of the cool features included. It is mainly targeted right now as a replacement for online league that use WordPress or Joomla to manage their leagues public facing web site.

What’s included in the FOSP 0.3 release?

FOSP League Manager 0.3 – I made some important changes under the hood to the MySQL import functionality and OOTP 14 MySQL file splits are now supported. So you can upload with no splits, splits made by OOTP 14 or split large files using the import tool itself. Also fixed bugs and cleaned up display some code in this module.

The Open Sports Toolkit (OST) 0.3 – This used to be the OOTP Open Web Toolkit, but it’s now opened up to all sports. This is the initial release of the high level sports abstraction library and tools and I’m really proud and excited about it. I think this library will be a must use by sports web site authors and developers.

OOTP Playoffs 0.1 – The first release of this tool. It’s mostly just a conversion of StatsLabs playoffs display to the FOSP format but I did enhance the look & feel to resemble that of more popular sports sties and baked in the OST to pull and render stats.

OSP Players Module 0.1 – A standalone module that renders the league’s player listing and player details pages. Breaking this code out was part of the process of making it available for inclusion by other modules. It is currently shared by the Playoffs and Last Sim modules in the 0.3 release.

OSP Last Sim 0.3 – An update to the Last Sim module to make it compatible with all 0.3 changes and allow for boxscores to be embedded across other modules.

Open StatsList Demo 0.1 – A demo module showing examples of how to use the new Open Sports Toolkit to query for and display data will be included in the 0.3 release as well. More for developers as an example of using the OST those OOTP players though it does provide team stats for display and access to player profiles.

More in depth looks at each feature will be forthcoming as well as a release date.

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jfox015

Jeff Fox is an almost twenty year web front end/ digital user experience technology leader. He cut his teeth in the web's early days and has worked for fortune 100 companies, small startup agencies and several companies in between. In addition to being a passionate developer and technical speaker, Jeff is a dedicated tech and sci-fi geek gladly indulging in Doctor Who and Star Wars marathons. He is also a talented musician, writer and proud father of three little Foxies. And don't get him started about his San Francisco Giants.